September 3, 2015

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As Elizabeth Rusch writes in The Next Wave, “We are in desperate need of a new clean, renewable energy source” and “pioneers are inventing machines to transform the potent pulsing movement of waves into electricity to light our homes and power our lives.”

Well, congrats are in order to M3 Wave LLC (the Mikes), selected as a semi-finalist in the Wave Energy Prize competition. You can read more about the exciting news in the press release below and learn about their research in The Next Wave: The Quest to Harness the Power of the Oceansby award-winning writer Elizabeth Rusch.

Date: August 24, 2015

For Immediate Release

Oregon-based M3 Wave selected as a semi-finalist in the Wave Energy Prize Competition

Company to unveil radical new design in quest for over $2M in prize money.

Salem, Ore. – Today M3 Wave LLC announced they have been selected as one of only 20 semi-finalists in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wave Energy Prize competition. The design-build-test competition is intended to encourage the development of game-changing wave energy conversion technology like M3’s.

“We are honored to be among only 20 teams in the world who have been selected and we look forward to pushing the envelope toward the breakthrough performance that has been so elusive for earlier generations of marine renewable technologies. This is an exciting next step in a journey we first started nearly a quarter-century ago” said Mike Morrow, company president and CEO.

M3 Wave plans to unveil their competition entry, codenamed NEXUS, in the months to come. Targeted as a deep-water, high power variant of their venerable DMP/APEX technology, the submerged NEXUS system has been developed in secret over the last 2 years using private funds. According to company CTO Mike Delos-Reyes, “The beauty of NEXUS is we enjoy an exponential increase in wave energy input to the device as we move closer to the ocean surface. This means we can get significantly more power output from the same APEX or DMP if we integrate it into a NEXUS system.”

NEXUS is designed with survivability in mind and has no exposed mechanical or electrical components, very similar to the APEX device that M3 deployed in the Pacific Ocean off Astoria, Oregon in the summer of 2014 with support from Oregon Wave Energy Trust. The simplicity of the technology ensures straightforward scale up from lab to prototype to pilot project.

M3 Wave is assembling a world-class team to aid in their Wave Energy Prize entry. Dynamics modeling support will come from Oregon State University’s Northwest National Renewable Energy Center while materials and fabrication engineering will be done in collaboration with Ershigs in Ridgefield, Washington. M3 will work with FTI out of Goleta, CA to adapt their revolutionary Prognostic and Health Monitoring System into NEXUS system architecture to improve uptime and reduce maintenance costs.

Based in Salem, Oregon, M3Wave, LLC is a leader in the field of submerged pressure differential wave energy devices. Founded by “three guys named Mike,” M3 is focused on commercializing a unique submerged wave energy conversion technology, called DMP, which was first pioneered by Mike Morrow and Mike Delos-Reyes at Oregon State University in 1991. DMP sits below the ocean surface safely away from storms, ships, and ocean views. The technology is at TRL6 thanks to commercialization grants from Oregon Wave Energy Trust and Oregon BEST and early seed funding from the U.S. Dept. of Energy, as well as private funding.

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